Duelling Poems on Painter Pavel Tchelitchew, by Ellaraine Lockie and Robert K. Johnson

Hide and Seek, by Pavel Tchelitchew (Russia). 1942.

Echoes of Survival

Two information desk attendants 
had never heard of the painting
The supervisor came to say It’s on the fifth floor
Locals don’t much like it but visitors do

A beloved writing mentor has recommended 
this viewing of his favourite work of art
Glaring through glass, an-oil-on-canvas tree
that some call The Tree of Life

Surely an antithetical nickname for a tree   
in the forest of World War II
A distorted blue-veined embryo
sucks me into an anarchy of children

Who hide in snarls of foliage
Faces contorted in grimaces and howls
Severed legs, feet, hands, fingers 
and ears intermingle with branches 
A colony of babies climbs toward a bit of blue sky 

Red of blood, green of bile, yellow of pus
and dark of night smear across the landscape 
As though the artist had vomited 
the guts of an apocalypse through his hands

Reverberations in universal language 
that will keep me awake 
with the words You must never forget
this miscarriage of humanity
I will focus on the small blue butterfly’s 
whispered echo of survival
Yet I must tell my mentor how 
I have become one of the locals

Ellaraine Lockie

Pavel Tchelitchew's Hide and Seek
(for E.L.)

The painting doesn't show you our world
dressed in its Sunday best or even
stripped of its pretties.
It shows you what's behind
our world's thin veil of skin.
So you see, spread across its centre,

the ancient tree of life,
its trunk dark as the moment
the past began, its branches' knuckles
gnarled by the relentless centuries,
but its fingers tipped with new blossoms;

you see—intertwined with the tree--
human beings bursting into vibrant life,
their heads flower-faced and with veins
like vines, see arms and legs ready 
to join torsos, a whole embryo,
a naked boy alive enough to pee,
while, high on a branch 
and wearing a sky-blue dress,
a girl quiet as an unplayed harp
sits dreaming of what is to come
or may never come,

and featured in front 
of the tree is the white flutter
of a butterfly's beauty next to a girl,
her dress red as a dark flame,
who embraces the tree trunk so tightly
its charge of power broadens her shoulders,
fills her calves with so much strength
she more than survives in this teeming reality.
She thrives.

Robert K. Johnson

Note from Ellaraine Lockie: "These two duelling poems came about after Robert K. Johnson (one of my editors and mentors) recommended that I see Hide and Seek when I visited NYC because it is his favourite of all paintings. I hated the painting and wrote a poem about why. Robert K., in response, wrote his own ekphrastic response poem. Both poems were previously published, side-by-side in the Chiron Review.

Ellaraine Lockie is widely published and awarded as a poet, nonfiction book author and essayist. Tripping with the Top Down is her thirteenth chapbook. Earlier collections have won Poetry Forum’s Chapbook Contest Prize, San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival Chapbook Competition, Encircle Publications Chapbook Contest, Best Individual Poetry Collection Award from Purple Patch magazine in England Competition, and the Aurorean’s Chapbook Choice Award. Ellaraine teaches writing workshops and serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine, Lilipoh.   

Robert K. Johnson, now retired, was a Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston for many years. For eight years, he was also Poetry Editor of Ibbetson Street magazine. His poems have been published individually in a wide variety of magazines and newspapers here and abroad. The most recent full-length collections of his poetry are From Mist to Shadow and Choir of Day.